ISABEL, SOLOMON ISLANDS — A new study led by University of Queensland researchers says that changes in global climate and the subsequent sea level rise has already led to the loss of multiple Pacific islands.

The team of Australian scientists, after sifting through decades worth of historical insight from locals as well as time series aerial and satellite imagery, say that Isabel, one of the main islands of the Solomon archipelago, has already lost five of its reef islands. These islands were once densely vegetated but weren't populated, reported the Washington Post. However, another six islands on Isabel have declined in area by more than 20 percent between 1947 and 2014.

Meanwhile, residents of the island of Nuatambu have been forced to relocate to the nearby main island of Choiseul because of flooding. Of the dozens of homes that once stood on Nuatambu, at least 11 have already been swept away by the rising waters. One town on the Solomon Islands' Taro Island began planning to relocate all of its residents in 2014 because the sea level rise threatens to swallow the land.

According to the study, while the global average rate of sea level rise has been 3.2 millimeters per year since 1993, the Solomon Islands have experienced an average rise by about 7 to 10 millimeters per year since 1994.

The research team, who published their study in the journal Environmental Research Letters on Friday, discovered that the sea level rise has destroyed villages that have existed since the 1930s, and has displaced numerous communities.

The weak force is one of the four fundamental forces that govern all matter in the universe (the other three are gravity, electromagnetism and the strong force). While the other forces hold things together, the weak force plays a greater role in things falling apart, or decaying.

The weak force, or weak interaction, is stronger than gravity, but it is only effective at very short distances. It acts on the subatomic level and plays a crucial role in powering stars and creating elements. It is also responsible for much of the natural radiation present in the universe, according to the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab).

Italian physicist Enrico Fermi devised a theory in 1933 to explain beta decay, which is the process by which a neutron in a nucleus changes into a proton and expels an electron, often called a beta particle in this context. "“He defined a new type of force, the so-called weak interaction, that was responsible for decay, and whose fundamental process was transforming a neutron into a proton, an electron and a neutrino," which was later determined to be an anti-neutrino, wrote Giulio Maltese, an Italian physics historian, in "Particles of Man," an article published in 2013 in the journal Lettera Matematica.

According to Maltese, Fermi originally thought that this involved what amounted to a zero-distance or adhesive force whereby the two particles actually had to be touching for the force to work. It has since been shown that the weak force is actually an attractive force that works at an extremely short range of about 0.1 percent of the diameter of a proton, according to HyperPhysics, a website produced by Georgia State University.,,,Beta decay

The process in which a neutron changes into a proton and vice versa is called beta decay. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL), "Beta decay occurs when, in a nucleus with too many protons or too many neutrons, one of the protons or neutrons is transformed into the other."

Beta decay can go in one of two ways, according to the LBL. In beta minus decay, sometimes annotated as β− decay, a neutron decays into a proton, an electron and an antineutrino. In beta plusdecay, sometimes annotated as β+ decay, a proton decays into a neutron, a positron and a neutrino. One element can change into another element when one of its neutrons spontaneously changes into a proton through beta minus decay or when one of its protons spontaneously changes into a neutron through beta plus decay.

In particle physics, proton decay is a hypothetical form of radioactive decay in which the proton decays into lighter subatomic particles, such as a neutral pion and a positron.There is currently no experimental evidence that proton decay occurs.

In the Standard Model, protons, a type of baryon, are theoretically stable because baryon number (quark number) is conserved (under normal circumstances; however, see chiral anomaly). Therefore, protons will not decay into other particles on their own, because they are the lightest (and therefore least energetic) baryon.

Some beyond-the-Standard Model grand unified theories (GUTs) explicitly break the baryon number symmetry, allowing protons to decay via the Higgs particle, magnetic monopoles or new X bosons. Proton decay is one of the few unobserved effects of the various proposed GUTs. To date, all attempts to observe these events have failed...,,,

. As further experiments and calculations were performed in the 1990s, it became clear that the proton half-life could not lie below 1032 years. Many books from that period refer to this figure for the possible decay time for baryonic matter.

Although the phenomenon is referred to as "proton decay", the effect would also be seen in neutrons bound inside atomic nuclei. Free neutrons—those not inside an atomic nucleus—are already known to decay into protons (and an electron and an antineutrino) in a process called beta decay. Free neutrons have a half-life of about 10 minutes (610.2±0.8 s)due to the weak interaction. Neutrons bound inside a nucleus have an immensely longer half-life—apparently as great as that of the proton.

Dirac was known among his colleagues for his precise and taciturn nature. His colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined a unit of a "dirac", which was one word per hour. When Niels Bohr complained that he did not know how to finish a sentence in a scientific article he was writing, Dirac replied, "I was taught at school never to start a sentence without knowing the end of it." He criticised the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's interest in poetry: "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."

Dirac himself wrote in his diary during his postgraduate years that he concentrated solely on his research, and stopped only on Sunday, when he took long strolls alone.

An anecdote recounted in a review of the 2009 biography tells of Werner Heisenberg and Dirac sailing on an ocean liner to a conference in Japan in August 1929. "Both still in their twenties, and unmarried, they made an odd couple. Heisenberg was a ladies' man who constantly flirted and danced, while Dirac—'an Edwardian geek', as biographer Graham Farmelo puts it—suffered agonies if forced into any kind of socialising or small talk. 'Why do you dance?' Dirac asked his companion. 'When there are nice girls, it is a pleasure,' Heisenberg replied. Dirac pondered this notion, then blurted out: 'But, Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?'"

According to a story told in different versions, a friend or student visited Dirac, not knowing of his marriage. Noticing the visitor's surprise at seeing an attractive woman in the house, Dirac said, "This is... this is Wigner's sister" . Margit Dirac told both George Gamow and Anton Capri in the 1960s that her husband had actually said, "Allow me to present Wigner's sister, who is now my wife."

Another story told of Dirac is that when he first met the young Richard Feynman at a conference, he said after a long silence, "I have an equation. Do you have one too?"

After he presented a lecture at a conference, one colleague raised his hand and said "I don't understand the equation on the top-right-hand corner of the blackboard". After a long silence, the moderator asked Dirac if he wanted to answer the question, to which Dirac replied "That was not a question, it was a comment."

Dirac was also noted for his personal modesty. He called the equation for the time evolution of a quantum-mechanical operator, which he was the first to write down, the "Heisenberg equation of motion". Most physicists speak of Fermi–Dirac statistics for half-integer-spin particles and Bose–Einstein statistics for integer-spin particles. While lecturing later in life, Dirac always insisted on calling the former "Fermi statistics". He referred to the latter as "Einstein statistics" for reasons, he explained, of "symmetry". ,,,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac

Julius Robert Oppenheimer will forever be remembered as one of the most infamous and controversial scientists in history. Originally a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942 he was recruited and took a leading role in the Manhattan Project. As the “father of the atomic bomb,” he is regarded by his supporters as helping to end World War II prematurely, so saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of troops, while his detractors point to the simple fact that he created the deadliest weapon in human history.

However, Oppenheimer was no stranger to controversy, as one curious incident during his formative years demonstrates. In 1924, Oppenheimer was accepted into studies at the prestigious Christ’s College of the University of Cambridge as a theoretical physicist. Here, he was placed under the tutelage of Patrick Blackett, an experimental physicist later made famous for his work on cosmic rays and paleomagnetism. This was not a successful pairing; due to his own ineptitude in the laboratory, Oppenheimer became envious of Blackett’s skills as an experimental physicist. Indeed, Oppenheimer initially wished to study experimental physics, but was prevented from doing so because of his “clumsiness” in the lab.

In 1926, in a fit of psychological despair while on vacation in Corsica, Oppenheimer confessed to his two accompanying friends that he had to return to Cambridge immediately. The reason? Before he had left for vacation, he had coated an apple in noxious laboratory chemicals and placed it on Blackett’s desk. Oppenheimer wanted to make sure that Blackett was alright.

Fortunately, he was. Unfortunately, the university’s administration had been informed of his little “prank” and intended to press charges, because prestigious institutions like Cambridge usually look down on students murdering the faculty. It was only through the intervention of his parents that Oppenheimer wasn’t charged; indeed, he was placed on academic probation and ordered to undergo regular psychiatric evaluations. Finally, at the end of 1926, Oppenheimer left Cambridge at the invitation of Max Born to study theoretical physics at the University of Gottingen.

Dirac’s story ends with a whimper. As a young man he had joked that physicists were all washed up by 30 and as he aged his powers waned. The Cambridge physics department took away his parking space and an outraged Manci insisted he take up a fellowship at Florida State University.

He died in 1984, aged 82. An atheist, he was buried under a gravestone chosen by Manci. It read “because God said it should be so”.

The Hungarian version of Eugene Paul Wigner's name was Jenó Pál Wigner. His father, Antal Wigner, was the director of a leather-tanning factory while his mother, Erzsébet Wigner, looked after the family of three children. Both Antal and Erzsébet were from a Jewish background but they did not practice Judaism. Paul was born in Pest, the eastmost of the two towns which, together with Buda, formed the Hungarian capital of Budapest. He was the middle of his parents three children, having both an older and younger sister.

From the time he was five years old Wigner was given private tuition at home. When he was ten years old he entered an elementary school but about a year after he began his studies at the school he was told that he had tuberculosis. The cure was to be found in sending him to a sanatorium in Breitenstein in Austria and he spent six weeks there before being told that the diagnosis had been wrong and that he had never had tuberculosis. However, one advantage of his six weeks was that he began to think about mathematical problems :

I had to lie on a deck chair for days on end, and I worked terribly hard on constructing a triangle if the three altitudes are given,,,

Wigner participated in a meeting with Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein that resulted in the Einstein-Szilard letter, which prompted President Franklin D. Roosevelt to initiate the Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs.